OpenSolaris Governing Board Dissolves Itself 198
mysidia writes "Last month, it was mentioned that the OpenSolaris governing board issued an ultimatum to Oracle. It turns out that Oracle continued to ignore requests to appoint a liaison after the governing board's demands. This morning, the board unanimously passed a resolution to dissolve itself. Source code changes are no longer available, and it would appear that OpenSolaris and community involvement in the development of Solaris have been killed as rumored. We recently discussed a 'Spork' of OpenSolaris called Illumos. Perhaps now, this will have a chance at becoming a true fork."
Uses for Opensolaris (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What momentum may that fork have? (Score:2, Informative)
A lot of core Solaris developers are already working on Illumos. This can become a great project, even better than Solaris itself. I expect to see many (Open) Solaris "users" move to support this project instead of supporting Oracle's one.
Re:Uses for Opensolaris (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What momentum may that fork have? (Score:1, Informative)
whenever Linux or BSD comes with a decent implementation of the most recent ZFS branch, there is probably going to be a massive conversion.
If there is a decent implementation of ZFS in the Linux or the BSD kernel, Oracle will sue the hell out of them.
Re:And nobody cared.... (Score:1, Informative)
We use Solaris for huge database servers that are too big to run Linux (mostly Oracle DB.)
Yahoo have over 2PB, yes PetaBytes, in PostgreSQL on Linux. I doubt your extremely slow Oracle is anywhere near that.
Re:Only a good thing (Score:2, Informative)
It's worth noting that Oracle is not kicking Solaris to the curb, they are kicking OpenSolaris to the curb.
Re:Question here. (Score:4, Informative)
That's plenty of work but there are people willing and able to get it done and they have a bootable system to evolve. The real question is when someone will kick off a full distro around it (since Illumos is purely a kernel).
Re:What momentum may that fork have? (Score:1, Informative)
Well, it's not so much any one thing, but a combination of things make it attractive to me as an administrator.
First, FreeBSD's ZFS may be "well underway", but it's showing no signs of being usable any time soon. Let it suffice to say that anyone paying attention or using FreeBSD ZFS for much more than one or two small servers is likely to agree that their implementation is not "enterprise ready" as they so arrogantly claim.
Second, I'm not so stupid as to fool myself into thinking ports on BSD is a sustainable administrative tool. Nexenta, and I believe Illuminos, use apt.
FreeBSD appears to be in decline as a project. I can't speak for developer activity, but I can say that their ability to actually ship code that works has become diminished since 7.1 or so. Entire subsystems have not worked for quite some time, yet they keep shipping it and saying "it'll be fixed in a couple years" (referring to USB and AHCI). Quite a few drivers have also had regressions.
In addition to ZFS, the Solaris kernel has dtrace, zones, and BrandZ.
Linux will NEVER get ZFS support in mainline.
ZFS on Solaris/OpenSolaris/Nexenta is usable today. Not only does it "have" it, but you're able to trivially export an iSCSI device, use deduplication, and (not 100% sure on this one, just read about it having been added to Solaris in April) do differential filesystem snapshots. FreeBSD's implementation has none of this, giving it little more appeal than current btrfs on mdraid (and in some ways, less).
Re:What momentum may that fork have? (Score:2, Informative)
Technically, the phrase "revisionist history" could mean several different things. But as actually used, it doesn't.
Re:What momentum may that fork have? (Score:3, Informative)
The point is that they worked on OpenSolaris not because it was their passion, but because it was their job. They've moved on.
Re:What momentum may that fork have? (Score:5, Informative)
[quote]First, FreeBSD's ZFS may be "well underway", but it's showing no signs of being usable any time soon. Let it suffice to say that anyone paying attention or using FreeBSD ZFS for much more than one or two small servers is likely to agree that their implementation is not "enterprise ready" as they so arrogantly claim.[/quote]
Hmm, it's been usable for many of us for quite some time. Not to say there haven't been problems with it, but less the equivalent point in OpenSolaris history since FreeBSD is able to import well tested code and patches for issues the first gen ZFS had in OpenSolaris.
[quote]Second, I'm not so stupid as to fool myself into thinking ports on BSD is a sustainable administrative tool. Nexenta, and I believe Illuminos, use apt.[/quote]
Again, many of us have used ports with great success for a long time. Personally, I find it easier than working with deb packages, and far easier than working with rpm's.
[quote]FreeBSD appears to be in decline as a project. I can't speak for developer activity, but I can say that their ability to actually ship code that works has become diminished since 7.1 or so. Entire subsystems have not worked for quite some time, yet they keep shipping it and saying "it'll be fixed in a couple years" (referring to USB and AHCI). Quite a few drivers have also had regressions.[/quote]
Wow this is like a broken record. The are no problems with either AHCI or USB for the vast majority of users. There were some changes to USB in 8.0, eg switched to being based off of libusb, device renaming, etc. AHCI and some the other related controller drivers were new in 8.0 as well, There were a few corner cases that didn't work well, but it's seen widespread usage with a great deal of success. The updates included in 8.1 address the corner cases and some further performance improvements. It's hard knowing what your issue is since you speak in generalities, but I assure you there are far more happy FreeBSD users than people like you.
[quote]In addition to ZFS, the Solaris kernel has dtrace, zones, and BrandZ.[/quote]
It's true OpenSolaris's zone are more advanced than FreeBSD jails, but for most uses the differences negligible. BSD Jails also integrate nicely with ZFS and FreeBSD's GEOM layer. OpenSolaris also has XEN dom0 support, I'm surprised you didn't take the opportunity to bag on FreeBSD's lack of it.
[quote]ZFS on Solaris/OpenSolaris/Nexenta is usable today. Not only does it "have" it, but you're able to trivially export an iSCSI device, use deduplication, and (not 100% sure on this one, just read about it having been added to Solaris in April) do differential filesystem snapshots. FreeBSD's implementation has none of this, giving it little more appeal than current btrfs on mdraid (and in some ways, less).[/quote]
It's trivial to export ZVOL on FreeBSD as iscsi targets. Granted it's not quite as nice as OpenSolaris since FreeBSD doesn't have an iscsi target in it's base system but there is a great one in ports and with a two minute wrapper script you have exactly the same functionality.
People talk of deduplication like it's some sort of magic bullet, but I think most of those people have no idea the overhead that imposes on the file system. Once they discover the resources necesscary to run it effectively, much of the enthusiasim fades away. It's a really a very select usage were deduplication would be economically feasible to implement.
Doesn't seem like you understand much about ZFS. Differential snapshot are integral to ZFS, you can't have ZFS with getting it so yes FreeBSD does have differential ZFS snapshots. Perhaps you're misidentifying this? http://netmgt.blogspot.com/2010/03/zfs-snapshot-differences.html [blogspot.com] Interesting, they have integrated diff into ZFS now. Trivial to do without the integration, if that's actually a make or break feature you need a new sys admin.
While you're getting some learning here, you s
Re:64-way DB Servers (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What momentum may that fork have? (Score:2, Informative)
Well that's a load of bull if I ever heard one. Your entire post needs a giant [citation needed].
I use FreeBSD ZFS at $work and it works great. Combine it with HAST and CARP and you have a pair of redundant application servers with instant data replication and failover. All on FreeBSD, all very, very usable.
The FreeBSD ports system is awesome IMO, I never understood why some people gets all worked up over it. There are advantages and disadvantages in all package management systems, but I've found FreeBSD ports (with Portmaster being my tool of preference) to be flexible and nice to work with. Maybe it's been a while since you used FreeBSD ? If so, try out Portmaster :)
Saying that the FreeBSD project as a whole is in decline is pretty strange considering the size of their "Quarterly Status Report" filled with all kinds of exciting things. See for example the latest one: http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/ [freebsd.org] - or the one before that.
Saying that the USB or AHCI subsystems hasn't worked for years is also, obviously, very wrong. For example, the AHCI driver works very well for my SATA drives, and it includes SATA hotplug support and whatnot. The USB system has worked fine for everything I've used it for - from 4.x through to 8.1 today.
The only thing I'll grant you is that deduplication and a couple of other nice ZFS features are not yet in FreeBSD, and they would indeed be nice to have. But saying ZFS on FreeBSD is useless because of this fact is a bit harsh don't you think ?
You may be happy with Solaris but please stop spreading FUD, check your facts, and have a nice day.
ps. sorry for AC, forgot my login somewhere, been a while since I last posted.